PhotoArt Centrum

The PhotoART Centrum is a non profit art association based in Kosice, Slovakia. It was established in 2009 by Pavel Maria Smejkal with friends and is active mainly in the field of photography. We organize a plenty of activities like exhibitions (including World Press Photo exhibition), competitions, courses, lectures, projections, exchanges, residencies, festivals, either as a part of our or partners projects, like Second Cities (supporting collaboration between second largest cities in EU), We were like this (an archive photo and film project interesting in amateur family archives), Foto-Fest Košice (a photographic festival), artproject in prison (now In Living Memory, before Grundtvig and personal documentary photo project), publishing activities )catalogues, books) and so on…

We are interested in archive material from 2010 when we started with our own project Takí sme boli (We were like this), which is interested in amateur family film and photo archives in Eastern Slovakia during the time of socialism (1948 – 1989). During that time we collected more than 50 archives and found footage not only from Slovakia finaly, scanned the original analogue material, archive, retuched it (if necessary), and published in numerous exhibitions, published book and used it in art projects. There is a lack of interest in not so old archives in Slovakia, so “We were like this” project is one of rare activities in that field here. We have plans to publishe more books from this material and also to use a part of this material in In Living Memory project, together with our partners from France, Italy, Spain, and Norway.

The associated partners in Slovakia for the “In living memory” project are: